Author: David Blane

Freedom of Thought?

To you it may seem obvious that you have free will, until you get influenced into thinking about it to a deeper depth, then it may seem that free will is just a figment of your imagination, which really might just mean that you did not think far enough in the first place because you were not stimulated by any outside influence to think more deeply about it?

Does everything just happen because of what happen preceding it?

We still do not know conclusively that our choices are determined. Our intuition, however, provides no good reason to think that they are not. If our instinct cannot support the idea of free will, then we lose our main rationale for resisting the claim that free will is an illusion.

Philosophical conflicts over such concepts as free will and consciousness often have their roots in ordinary intuitions, and the historical debates often end in stalemates.

Seeing free will in terms of these psychological capacities has the interesting implication that it is in principle measurable. We already have tests that assess people's reasoning skills, creativity, selfcontrol and the likes, all of which are essential components of supposed "psychological free will".

Some say in order to be responsible for doing something in order to have done it freely we need to have been able to do something else. We need multiple options, or alternative possibilities, but that seems contradictory in itself.

Humans are convinced that they make conscious choices as they live their lives. But instead it may be that the brain just convinces itself that it made a free choice from the available options after the decision is made

The idea was tested out by tricking subjects into believing that they had made a choice before the consequences of that choice could actually be seen. In the test, people were made to believe that they had taken a decision using free will even though that was impossible

A new study builds on that work and says that the brain rewrites history when it makes its choices, changing our memories so that we believe we wanted to do something before it happened.

Simulation hypothesis:

The simulation hypothesis proposes that all of reality, including the earth and the universe, is in fact an artificial simulation, most likely a computer simulation.

If indeed we have no free will then are we merely a simulation as suggested by University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrum, when he suggested that members of an advanced civilisation with enormous computing power might decide to run simulations of their ancestors. They would probably have the ability to run many, many such simulations, to the point where the vast majority of minds would actually be artificial ones within such simulations, rather than the original ancestral minds. So simple statistics suggest it is much more likely that we are among the simulated minds.

Nick Bostrom argues that we may very well all be Sims.

Nick Bostrom proposed a trilemma that he called "the simulation argument". Despite the name, Bostrom's "simulation argument" does not directly argue that we live in a simulation; instead, Bostrom's trilemma argues that one of three unlikely-seeming propositions is almost certainly true:

1. "The fraction of human-level civilisations that reach a post-human stage (that is, one capable of running high-fidelity ancestor simulations) is very close to zero", or!

2. "The fraction of post-human civilisations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero", or!

3. "The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one"

Yet not everyone agrees with this reasoning, Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University said that the statistical argument that most minds in the future will turn out to be artificial rather than biological is also not a given because its just not based on well-defined probabilities.

"The argument says you'd have lots of things that want to simulate us. I actually have a problem with that. We mostly are interested in ourselves. I don't know why this higher species would want to simulate us".

Randall admitted she did not quite understand why other scientists were even entertaining the notion that the universe is a simulation. "I actually am very interested in why so many people think it's an interesting question". She rated the chances that this idea turns out to be true "effectively zero", but some researchers think they could find experimental evidence that we are living in a computer game.

Professor of philosophy at New York University David Chalmers said that you're not going to get any proof that we're not in a simulation, because any evidence that we get could be simulated.

The brain is an electrochemical machine:

According to the medical experts, everything that you think and feel is electro chemistry, although we don't understand how physical matter gives rise to consciousness, yet there is this extraordinary truth that everything that we are thinking and feeling now is electrochemistry.

The brain is an electrochemical machine, thus are we just a circular causal relationship that is, where action by the system generates some change in its environment and that change is reflected in the system in some manner (feedback) that triggers a system change?

The way you speak is the result of the way you think. That is, your thought process is reflected in how you express and communicate yourself through the means of language. Therefore, the more of a freethinking person you think you are, the more your speech will reflect your mind?

On the contrary, the more manipulated your thinking is through blind belief created by social programming, the less you will be able to speak out your mind because, in a sense, it is not yours.

Everybody might be free to utter whatever comes to their mind, but what is so important in doing so if all that does come is actually just utter nonsense arising from blind belief created by social programming, which is just created by other peoples interlinked electro chemistry processes which control the social programming, which equates to nothing more than SLAVERY.